38

Morning Mass
July 1996

Docherty’s flight to Toronto descended in a lavender dawn. He had that long-haul sense that his brain and major organs had somehow been sundered from his body.

He still had a bus ride to reach the Order’s house in Waterloo, and on finally arriving there he found to his delight two of his fellow priests, including Tubby, waiting for him. So this is homecoming … Perhaps I do belong here, he thought.

Later, he ate with them in the monastery dining room, exchanged the news of the summer and talked about Jean Chrétien and his opposition to Quebec separatism.

‘Did you cause trouble down in Sydney?’ asked Tubby Enright.

‘I’m still not popular with the boss down there. I’ll fill you in when I’ve got more energy.’ Then they all drank a beer and eased their way off to their beds.

In the corner of Docherty’s room sat his personal computer like a comrade. It was shrouded with a cover – its last night of rest before his invigorating work recommenced. Seeing it he remembered with exhilaration his graduate seminar in behavioural psychology in two days’ time, the fact it would sweep him up and energise him. Tomorrow was not too early to do further drafting of his work for Bishop Egan, a chance to redeem the stigma he bore in the eyes of Cardinal Condon of Sydney.

From a profound, exhausted sleep, he woke early the next morning. Although he did not quite know what time it was in Sydney, his body was falsely declaring itself alert to begin the day and he still felt the terrible dislocation associated with a trans-global migration.

He had not only his own PC but a fax line in his room for university communications with students and staff. And he had not been long awake when it began to stutter forth new pages to join some weeks of unanswered messages, in urgent and emphatic black, in the tray. There seemed to be a wearying number of them. And this for the quiet time of year!

The first page that emerged was handwritten and had Sarah Fagan’s name on it. He read the message. It had been sent the morning after she’d seen him off.

Dear Frank,

I still feel bad I had my young friend crunch you. As you know, I have travelled a long way in a little time and I hope you didn’t mind travelling the short drop to the footpath. I decided to play it as hard as them, so you’ll have to forgive me. Remember the card you dropped on the cab seat the first time I met you? It had this fax number I’m trying, so I hope I’ve reached you with the news. Wood’s gone public with Shannon’s name. It’s astounding. Justice in one hit! Nowhere for the man to hide! I found it easy to come out once Wood had set up a way of doing it for us. See attached. And thanks.

He watched other pages edging for Wood, pages with text and images. He was impatient for them all to download in a way he could not remember having ever felt in the old days when communications took so long, so many days and weeks.

On the first of the pages was a photograph of Sarah Fagan herself, rather photogenic, looking at the camera unflinchingly, comfortable with her accusations, her support of the evidence of Stephen Cosgrove and Wood. There was a picture of a harried Monsignor Leo Shannon. For, according to the article Sarah had sent, the cardinal’s office said it was only in recent days that accusations against the monsignor had reached them, and, it went on, that archdiocesan authorities had considered withdrawing Monsignor Shannon from the Devitt case. It seemed that Leo Shannon would, for the first time in his career, find himself reduced and written off, even before any charges arose. He too would have an education in archdiocesan expediency.

Independently of the investigation, the Church had announced it intended to abandon the challenge to Dr Devitt’s plea for the suspension of the Limitation Act and would enter into negotiation with his lawyers. And on the next page he saw the text of Stephen Cosgrove’s letter in the tabloid.

Docherty shaved distractedly, too many developments to absorb. Maureen would be shattered, he knew. Should he call? What would he say? What time was it in Sydney? Nine in the evening. Not too late, given the circumstances.

He dialled her number. The only answer was the redolent Australian dial tone, then Damian’s recorded voice inviting him to leave a message.

‘I don’t know what you two must be feeling,’ Docherty told the cold telephonic vacancy. ‘Maureen … you don’t deserve … you deserve to be free of your brother’s shame. I’m sorry. I send my love.’

He was guiltily relieved that he had not needed to speak to them. Why were they out? Had kind Damian taken her away for a road trip? Was she sedated?

Docherty set off to walk the few kilometres to the parish church, St Anthony of Padua. The pleasant streets were empty, unaware of the Sydney ferment, the birds in the white pines not yet awake. He felt strangely exposed. What if the tabloid had followed him here? His fellow priests might not be amused. He also marvelled and his blood raced, however, to know that a great and necessary blow had been landed, that complacency had been routed, that secrecy and legal fictions would not serve.

He came into the yard of the parish and went to the back of the presbytery. Mrs Cerretti would have arrived to make Father Madelena’s breakfast. She did not live in the presbytery, yet it was confidently suggested by parishioners that she and Father Madelena were or had been lovers. So be it. Madelena was a good and attentive man and a fine parish priest to his people, a man of acceptance and not of exclusion. If love had taught him that, who could condemn him to Hell?

Docherty could see her, a dumpling of a woman, through the lit kitchen, chopping shallots as if for an omelette. He knocked on the door.

‘It’s me, Docherty.’

She opened up with her slow, shy smile, the antithesis of the dragon women who’d guarded presbyteries when he was a child.

‘How’s Gene?’ he asked as she ushered him in.

‘Overworked,’ she said. ‘How are you? How did you get on Down Under?’

‘I got into trouble with the cardinal archbishop of Sydney.’

‘Why do I believe that?’

‘All jokes aside, is Gene well?’

‘No. He’s had the flu. He’s been given another parish to run. We’d be sunk without you guys from the monastery.’

‘Do you want to let him sleep and I’ll say morning Mass?’

‘Well … I’ve got to call him soon.’

‘Why not let him rest? Let me do it. I’ve got jetlag and I’m wide awake. Ready to go dancing.’

‘All right. You’ll have a congregation of about fifteen. I’ll be one of them. I’ll deal with the criticism from him when it arrives.’

‘You have an acolyte, I take it?’

‘Oh, Mr Meaney. He’s here.’

‘Good.’

‘He’ll already be over there at the sacristy. He has the keys to unlock the church.’

‘What a man!’ said Docherty. Meaney was old, and of indomitable faith. Post-Famine Irish, his family had come down the interminable St Lawrence on a fever ship – so he had told Docherty. They had died by battalions in the quarantine station of Grosse-Île off Quebec. Mr Meaney’s grandparents were descendants of the survivors.

Docherty went across from the presbytery, traversing the nearby school’s basketball court, and entered the standard sacristy – like one found anywhere in the English-speaking world: dim, austere, clean, with its drawers of vestments. It had always been the side-room sanctuary of the traditional second-class citizens of the New World, the Irish, Italians, Poles, Ukrainians.

Old Mr Meaney, waiting on a chair in the corner, stood up and growled, ‘H’llo Father. You on today?’

And now here we are together, thought Docherty warmly, in the dark years of the faith of our forefathers, in an age when working mothers no longer slave to have the honour of their sons as altar boys, when Father Madelena had wisely fallen back on the option of the altar boys of yesteryear, represented today by Mr Meaney.

‘They said you were in Australia,’ said Mr Meaney, as Docherty washed his hands.

‘Just back, Mr Meaney.’

‘And your family there well, I hope?’

‘Not too bad,’ said Docherty. ‘My mother’s in a retirement home. But she seems undefeated.’

‘Ah,’ said Meaney, ‘that’s facing me too, if my kids have their way.’

‘Green vestments, isn’t it, for today?’ asked Docherty.

‘The same the whole world over,’ said Meaney with a sort of weary but proud certitude.

Docherty began to robe himself according to the garments of ancient Roman princehood – in an amice and the long white alb, with the cincture tied around his waist, and the stole around his neck, crossed and held by the cincture. With Mr Meaney’s help, he placed the chasuble of green over his shoulders. These were considered the robes of supermen when he was a kid, though they had through the follies of the Church since earned a more ambiguous response.

As he robed he said the old Latin prayers to himself – he was keen on Latin, though he could not as a democrat refuse the validity of an English-language Mass.

Meanwhile, Mr Meaney had put on his own surplice and was dressing the chalice and preparing the wine and water cruets. It was said that altar wine was designed to be so bad that even alcoholic priests did not look forward to the consecration and consumption of Christ’s blood.

‘Thank you for that,’ Docherty told Meaney as he took the chalice in his hands.

Meaney now preceded him and opened the door on to the sanctuary. The congregation that stood for him was precisely as he expected − the few widowed men, the pious women of over sixty, and an obsessive-compulsive young invalid pensioner, who sometimes went to two or three Masses at various churches in a day as a belt and braces form of achieving salvation. Docherty had counselled him and assured him that observance once a day was more than enough. The young man had cheerily agreed with him and continued to seek Masses around the place.

At the bottom of the symbolic mountain made by the stairs of the altar and the little mound on which the altar stood, Docherty turned to the congregation and greeted them, these hallowed few; no less hallowed than the thousands entering the morning commute, some of them making the long daily trip into Toronto, but these had come to share the rite, and thus were the most immediately precious to him, these members of a minority club. He felt love for them stir in him − habitual, unrequited and irreducible − and for Christ his brother, the redeemer, Jesu, Joshua, Jesse, Jesus, the man who had laid down a ruthless rule: ‘If you do this to one of the least of my brethren, you do it to me.’

Such was the Gospel according to the Bedouin-brown Jesus, better honoured by many unbelievers than by those who loudly claimed to be his men, his women. Docherty had always had fellow feeling for unbelievers, because in a parallel universe, without having begun life as he had, he would have been one. But through accidents of history and birth and even immigration, this was his mystery. And he would never abandon his misrepresented and abused brother Jesus, brought into disrepute by the apparatchiks of the Church, and, of course, a day past in Australia, by Monsignor Shannon. What of Maureen? he wondered again. How is she handling the reflected shame? For she was, of course, a victim too.

‘As you and I were there in the beginning, let us be there at the end of things, my brother,’ prayed Docherty. He didn’t care if it was literal sense. It made sense to him. It was the correlative of all his sensibilities.

It was home.